January 28, 2010

The Midweek Philosopher

* Department of You Can't Make This Shit Up

In Piedmont, CA police found the dead, mummified body of Patricia Bostrom sitting in a comfy chair in her living room. Police say the last time Bostrom had been seen alive was 6 years ago when she was 82 years old. Bostrom's daughter, Sunny, regularly picked up mail at the house, planted flowers in the yard and paid the utility bills. She claims she thought her mother had gone traveling to Scotland. Sunny Bostrom is now running for City Council in Piedmont. Her platform? Helping seniors and crime prevention.

*Dave Trott on losing at snooker to his art director, Dave Christensen:

"The difference was, Dave was playing like a creative director and I was just playing like a creative. He was seeing the big picture: winning the game. All I was looking at was the individual shot."

"Writing a blog is like joining a gym. You start out like a house on fire, but before you know it, you're putting on weight and your membership has lapsed."

* The great Grumpy Brit has nominated the first candidate for the 2010 Bully Awards. It's a piece that appeared in Marketing Magazine’s 2010: Industry Expert Predictions and was written by a guy named Andy Krupski. It's a wonderful start to the 2010 bullshit season.

"People will continue to buy and pay more for reliable brand reputations that enrich the depth and breadth of their own identity. The future belongs to any product that can give users a unique identity and place, be it real or virtual. 2010 will be about combining an engaging story with an immersive experience so that the brand becomes an avatar and the communications investment becomes an extension of the brand experience. Communications technology is now the enabler, source and subject matter of human entertainment as a result the concept of the “Avatar” has crossed the chasm into mainstream culture and branding."

* Unbelievable. From Sharon Krinsky:

85% of all brand purchases are made by women. 3% of advertising agency creative directors are women.

* Web metrics: A cruel joke.

In the past few weeks this blog has achieved its highest number of subscribers ever (by the way, thanks.) During the same period of time it has dropped in the Ad Age Power 150 (which actually measures over 1,000 blogs) from #112 to # 344. Meanwhile in another listing of advertising blog popularity it's #45.

* The inevitable disillusionment in every agency person's life occurs when they discover that advertising is so much more interesting than advertisers.

*You think our politicians are nuts? Check this out.

Mircea Geoana recently lost the presidential election in Romania. He is now claiming that the reason he lost was that before a key debate against his rival for the presidency, he was the target of negative energy waves. He claims that his rival, President Traian Basescu, hired a parapsychologist to put a Romanian voodoo on him.

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Creative people make the ads. Everyone else makes the arrangements."

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business is about sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."